50 frames per second
by 10millionpeople
Summary: 50 days after the end of the war.


Day 1

Neither of us goes outside all day. From my bedroom window, I can see him asleep in his den. I can't see the bottle on his coffee table, but I know it's there.

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Day 2

My mother doesn't call. I don't pick up.

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Day 3

It is exactly 193 steps to his front door, Prim once told me.

It is 191 more than I can take.

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Day 4

I stumble a dream about the last night he touched me. It was right before The End. Everything feels the same until I turn and shoot him instead of Coin.

I wake up screaming.

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Day 5

He knocks on my door around eight in the morning. It's early enough to be sober, even for him.

"Nightmares," I say.

He steps through and into the kitchen. "I know."

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Day 6

He left a case of whisky on my porch yesterday. I take the first one out after lunch, and by dinner, I can't feel anything anymore.

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Day 7

I wake up to a leftover bottle on my nightstand, half-full. I down it in one shot.

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Day 8

I must have been screaming last night, because he's at my door again with breakfast. He brings

eggs, milk, sausage. My only good memory from the Victory Tour was eating french toast with him on the train, but he doesn't bring any bread.

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Day 9

My mother calls.

I don't pick up.

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Day 10

Greasy Sae tells me later that she found me after lunch crying on my kitchen floor beside a loaf of cheese-baked bread. I could have sworn I came home from the Hob with wheat.

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Day 11

Not many of us are left in District 12, so I figure I should hold onto the ones that are.

He accepts my dinner invitation. I cook fish.

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Day 12

He comes over for dinner again and touches me for the first time. Not the Girl on Fire, not the Mockingjay, just me.

With his fingers on my cheek, saying, "It's never going to be the same, sweetheart, but it will be okay," for once not using the nickname as a weapon, but a term of endearment, I don't smell alcohol on either of us.

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Day 13

My mother doesn't call.

Gale doesn't call.

Peeta doesn't call.

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Day 14

We celebrate the two week anniversary of our return with a case of vodka.

I stay at his house, too drunk to stumble home. He sleeps on the couch.

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Day 15

When I wake up, there's an extra blanket on top of me and my whole body is warm. The smell of soap and steam fills the entire house.

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Day 16

It rains today.

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Day 17

Early in the morning (like three a.m., Jesus) thunder rolls in like war bombs and wakes me up. When I knock on his door crying, he's motionless for a minute, then pulls me inside. Lets me beat my fists against his chest, doesn't let go.

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Day 18

While I'm throwing laundry into the washer, the green t-shirt he gave me to wear yesterday

comes up in the pile. I leave it out, shove it under my pillow.

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Day 19

"You're gonna drink yourself to death," I say to him over dinner.

When he uncaps his second bottle, I say more quietly, "Don't leave me here alone."

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Day 20

A cold keeps me in bed all day. He doesn't seem like the kind to really care, but he stays at my house, brings me quail soup, drinks water.

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Day 21

I can see his hands shake in the morning for a day spent sober. I can't tell what's better—eyes that actually look alive instead of glassed over, or a little less of a burden on his back.

Either way, I still his hands with my own, drop pain killers into his palm.

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Day 22

We have lunch together, and he's drunk as hell again. I stay quiet.

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Day 23

The phone doesn't ring at all anymore. I tell myself the lines are just down.

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Day 24

He kisses me when I start out to go hunting and can't touch my bow. He cups his hands under my jawbone, presses his forehead to mine. The look in his eyes tells me that it's not pity, that it's something bigger.

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Day 25

He hides in his house all day, and I don't intrude. Instead, I press my lips to bottles of beer, whiskey, and wine, trying to taste him again.

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Day 26

I barge into his house demanding to make dinner. We have fish again, a different kind. From across the table, he gives me the same look that was in his eyes when we kissed, and the parentheses click shut around everything he hasn't said.

"How long?" I ask. He smiles in the same way I always imagine Atlas.

"Too long."

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Day 27

Too many four letter words feel like dirt in our mouths, so we don't say them out loud.

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Day 28

I shouldn't have gone to his house again last night; I should have known to stay away.

When day breaks, I wake up first. He stirs when the mattress shifts, but doesn't open his eyes. I dress, slip into shoes, grab one of his shirts on the way out that I know he won't miss.

Look at this fool, making me all sentimental. He will ruin me, I think, with 191 steps to walk home.

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Day 29

I finish off the last of my whiskey.

I open another bottle of wine.

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Day 30

I don't knock anymore, I just go in. He's passed out on the couch, floor littered with glass and when I try to wake him, he doesn't respond. It takes ten minutes and a bucket of cold water to realize his liver is, miraculously, still kicking.

I pretend I'm not crying. He plays along.

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Day 31

"You can't do this to me, you can't leave me here, stay with me, please, please stay."

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Day 32

It's starting to get colder.

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Day 33

He brings over breakfast unannounced, and I forget I'm wearing one of his shirts until I see him staring. Involuntarily, my jaw hinges just a little, just enough for him to know.

"How long?" he asks. He isn't talking about when I took his clothes.

"Too long."

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Day 34

He's the first to leave this time. I know he's getting up and can hear him shuffle across the bedroom, open the front door, but I don't ask him to stay.

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Day 35

"Do you think they're happy?" I ask during lunch.

"Maybe. Probably. As happy as they can be." He takes another bite of his peanut butter sandwich, another swig of beer. "Lucky bastards."

"We got the better end of this."

He quirks his eyebrow. "How so?"

I shrug. "We each got someone who understands. We got each other." He looks at me for a long time. Pours the rest of the beer down the drain, throws the bottle in the trash.

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Day 36

When he knocks at my door at sundown, he's carrying a little duffle bag.

"Geese have invaded my backyard. I'm sick of looking at them."

I step aside and he throws his bag down on the couch, grabs a blanket from my hall closet, takes a pillow. He puts them both back up when I grab his bag and walk upstairs to my bedroom instead.

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Day 37

I wake up sometime during the night to a warm feeling all down my back, arms encircling my waist.

Groggily, I turn my head around to see his gray Seam eyes already open, nose pressed against my hair.

"Will you still be here in the morning?" I slur. He inhales deeply.

"It is morning, sweetheart," he says, and I drift back into unconsciousness, the last thing I remember being a soft, "Yes," in my ear.

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Day 38

"You keep one of my shirts under your pillow," he says to me while we're reading on the couch. He is sitting on one end and I am laying on the other, my legs across his lap and the hand that is not holding his book running tiny circles on my calves.

It's a statement, but I answer his question anyway.

"I wanted to feel close to you."

He stiffens, then exhales. "Do you now?" I mark my page, fold my book over, place it on the floor. Turn to face the back of the couch to sleep while his fingers are still so calming on my skin.

"I do."

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Day 39

Over meals when he thinks I'm not looking, he breaks off tiny pieces of bread and collects them in a napkin in his lap. He goes home periodically to "get things," but I can see him throw the little knots out in his backyard for the geese.

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Day 39

The geese migrate to my backyard. His clothes migrate to my drawers.

My toothbrush is white and his is green, so we each know which one to use.

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Day 40

At night, he wraps me in his arms and kisses my forehead and he is the ocean, he is the sound of deer in the woods, he is early morning french toast, he is flowers planted in the backyard, he is the smell of leather, he is whiskey, he is snow and rain and sun and all the stars in the sky.

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Day 41

Sae brings us soup for lunch and we eat in silence. His hands do not shake, but he drinks water and I realize that I have not seen him with alcohol in a very long time.

After, we curl up on the couch by the fire and try to figure out where his arm ends and the length of my shoulders begins. The crook of his shoulder, my head. I'm getting used to the smell of pine and firewood on him.

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Day 42

It snows today. He grabs my wrist when dusk starts to make everything look soft and tranquil and we tug on our boots with both hands, barrel out into the cold, call it frost even though all the roses in the yard are dead.

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Day 43

When afternoon hits, we are still in bed.

The window is white-edged from the cold and the quilt on top of us is warm, so we curl up together and doze on and off for the better part of the day.

I think about all the answers I have to the question mark he folds himself into behind me, how he is wrapped around me like a lover. I keep that word in the back of my mind, but I never say it out loud. I never think it, I do not dream, I cannot.

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Day 44

I wake up from a nightmare about Prim and when he tries to restrain my thrashing and screaming, I claw at his neck, leave the skin raw and red.

When I come to, he is in the bathroom with a washcloth on the place I scratched, and I whisper from the bedroom, "I'm so sorry, please leave me, you deserve a better life."

He rings out the washcloth splashes splashes water on his face, doesn't look at me when he says, "So do you."

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Day 45

He spends the entire day nailing together planks of wood from the Hob. When the sun sets, my entire backyard has been fenced in, the geese rounded up and put inside.

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Day 46

We sit on the floor by the fire and he teaches me how to play gin rummy with an old deck of cards we found in his attic. I beat him for the first time twenty-eight rounds later.

Another apple to slice appears on the kitchen counter when he looks at me from over my winning hand, pushes himself up on his knees, leans over to me.

He slants his lips to mine and smiles against my mouth, moves us both to sit with him on the floor and me in his lap, both my legs hooked around his waist, arms around his shoulders until we mould together completely.

It's a kiss that lends itself to so much more than we have ever spoken, and we still do not speak; we do not need to.

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Day 47

He comes in from the backyard mad as hell, about to reach for the first bottle he can find as he says, "A damn goose got loose."

I hear glass clinking together in the refrigerator door before I start laughing, pretty soon doubled over on the floor when he mutters a breathy, "Dammit," and starts laughing too, threatening murder if I say anything about him being "a poet who doesn't know it."

When the spell passes, I take out a cup for tea and he asks me to fix him a cup as well, pouring his whiskey down the drain. Later, a goose shows up on the front porch.

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Day 48

I unbraid my hair before going to bed. "Haymitch?" I ask, tucked under his arm between the bedsheets. He hums positively, and I continue. "Why aren't you drinking as much lately?"

He is silent for a little while, running his fingers through my hair. "Gain a new addiction, lose an old one, I guess." He doesn't look at me when he says it.

I turn away from him and pull both of his arms around me, trembling when he presses his face to the back of my head, lips on the back of my neck, nose in my hair.

When he thinks I'm asleep, I can hear him exhale and whisper, "God, I love you. You will never know the extent to which I love you." I do not move until he starts to snore lightly. I bury my face in the sheets, cry for the first time in a long time completely awake.

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Day 49

"Do you still think we have the capacity to love?" He gives me this look like the question hit him square in the face. He lays down his cards face up, but I don't look at his hand. "We've committed horrible acts. You lost your girl, I lost Peeta…do you think we can move on from that?"

I think I know the answer. But what I heard last night, I already knew, and I still did not see it coming. I've known for a while, we both have, but we have been deaf and mute and ignorant for a very long time.

"I think so, sweetheart," he says, and I nod my head and will myself not to cry again. It doesn't work, but he takes me into himself and says, "I'm sorry, I'll leave if you want, I'm so sorry."

In between sobs, I rip open his chest and bury the word "stay" in it so many times I think it might burst.

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Day 50

Neither of us goes outside all day. He makes breakfast and we spill crumbs in the bed, strip off the sheets to wash and make a bed by the fire.

He curls me into his arms on the floor and kisses me like the ocean, like I am snow and rain and sun and all the stars in the sky.

"I love you, too."


End file.
